Peer to Party: Occupy the Law Mélanie Dulong De Rosnay
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Peer to party: Occupy the law Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay To cite this version: Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay. Peer to party: Occupy the law. First Monday, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, 2016, 21 (12), 10.5210/fm.v21i12.7117. halshs-01409222 HAL Id: halshs-01409222 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01409222 Submitted on 5 Dec 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Peer to Party: Occupy the Law by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay First Monday, December 2016 Abstract In this paper I infuse political and legal theory with peer to peer decentralized design features. This experiment studies how property and liability, two core legal institutions attached to individual persons, react and can be transformed (like chemical elements) when applied a peer to peer, distributed design. This empirical and evolutionary approach of hacking the law, seen as a regulatory system, is then applied to the peer production of law itself, as a political advocacy method for achieving legal reform inspired by the peer to peer ethos. Keywords distribution, decentralization, law, peer to peer, hacking, peer production, property, liability, commons, responsibility, do-ocracy Contents Introduction Peer to Peer, an Alternative Design Principle, and the Law Distributed Property Distributed Liability Distributed Participation Conclusion Introduction Cyberspace has renewed legal thinking (Lessig, 1999a and 1999b, Elkin-Koren and Salzberger, 2004). More specifically, peer to peer is a disruptive technology (Oram, 2001) for copyright law and cultural industries (Litman; 2001; Vaidhyanathan, 2005), and for law enforcement in general. Peer to peer transformative power can also be applied to knowledge (commons-based peer production, Benkler, 2006) and more broadly to society (Bauwens, 2005; Glorioso et al., 2010). A challenge to neoliberalism, peer to peer is also used purely for convenience (Cammaerts, 2011). Many applications have developed alternative communication paths around these protocols: In recent years, governments around the world have turned off the internet or restricted in- ternet access in moments of political unrest and during large-scale protests. But, what do you do if you are reporting on an event and can no longer communicate with others, send information back to editors, use Twitter to follow live updates, or access Google Maps to navigate your way through city spaces? How do you transmit information when the internet is not accessible? Hong Kong Protests Propel FireChat Phone-to-Phone App “Peer to Party” in the title of this article refers to the rise of peer to peer, not only as a technical infrastructure on the networks, but also as a sustainable political economy model for developing knowledge, goods and services, and as a set of alternative values in society. “Peer” is used both in the technical sense (as node in a peer to peer infrastructure) and in the social meaning (person hosting a node, using a peer to peer application, contributing to decentralized peer production, as defined by Dulong de Rosnay and Musiani, 2016). In this paper, a jurisprudential analysis unfolding the theory of distributed architecture, I study the effect of applying peer to peer, defined as a technological design principle (Schollmeier, 2001; Reed and Sanders, 2008), to the liberal legal institutions of property, liability and democratic political participation. In this sense, beyond using technology as a tool of the law (Code as Law, Lessig, 1999), I propose to use technology as a tool for exploration and modelling of the law (following this methodology, see also Guadamuz, 2011, which uses network science to analyze internet law). Property and liability have been chosen as the most important legal institutions in private law and internet law, while political participation is the third element parsed through the peer to peer lens as an instrument of change and an actionable strategy for implementing distribution in the first two institutions. Peer to peer fragmentation is particularly disruptive for the law because legal reasoning is accustomed to operate on subjects which are characterized by and uniquely attached to some spatio-temporal existence. At the core of our argument, this ontological difference between the nature of distributed technology and positivist legal thinking is also reflected in the gap between, on the one hand, capitalism, relying on identified entities (firms, workers) and, on the other hand, commons-based peer production, organized around non-fixed and uneven contributions. To link both ontological differences, the law is traditionally much more protective of the interests of capital (Capra and Mattei, 2015), with its identified owners, than of the commons, with a crowd of distributed peers, and the future generations which may contribute to and benefit from it. The contribution of this article is firstly to apply peer to peer to the theory of law, and also to suggest its transformative potential to reduce inequalities caused by the extreme concentration of capital and political power. As a technology to be regulated (another mode of interaction between peer to peer and the law), peer to peer challenges the law, which usually applies to individuals, both in its reasoning and in its enforcement, at first copyright, considered as intellectual “property” [1], and intermediary liability, two central legal institutions discussed in this paper (Sections 2 and 3). Peer to peer is a reshaping element for the law (Lessig, 1999a, 1999b; Elkin-Koren and Salzberger, 2004; Elkin-Koren, 2006; Murray, 2006; Brown and Marsden, 2013), and a force able to transform other sources of power (Mansell, 2012), which can be applied in order to fragment legal categories, and distribute property (Section 2) and responsibility (Section 3). The rhizomatic distribution of actions among actors, as operated in peer to peer architectures which can be observed in distributed storage (Musiani, 2014) and community wireless mesh networks (Dulong de Rosnay, 2015), is prompting a recon- ceptualization of legal categories and a transformation of legal thinking. The “Party” in the title refers to this technical fragmentation into parts (partire, divide in Latin). For lawyers, a party designates the legal entity participating in a contract, a lawsuit or any kind of legal action. Generally speaking, a party is an informal gathering of peers, possibly involving potluck and unexpected outcomes. “Peer to party” intends to set the tone for an admittedly rhetorical and idealistic celebration of peer to peer, even if peer to peer does not always challenge capitalism (Cammaerts, 2011). In terms of scholarship, this paper stretches and applies the concept transversally, as a transformative element, and observes how the law reacts to it. The use of only pure peer to peer architectures at all communications levels (connectivity, encryption, applications, content, etc.) cannot necessarily be observed in “natural habitat” conditions. Some degree of centralization can be observed at some level most of the time. However, for the purpose of demonstration, I apply distributed architecture as an ideal type, mimicking experimental laboratory conditions in the natural sciences, in the same way that economists may rely on the supposed invisible hand of the market for some demonstrations. “Occupy the law” proposes a sit-in approach to legal categories with the intention of changing the system outside a traditional political “party” by hacking the law, where hacking is understood as a social and cultural practice of resistance (Lin, 2004; Kelty, 2008; Berry, 2008; Barron, 2013; Coleman, 2013; Powell, 2016a). A number of blogs are using the expression “Occupy the law” to convey contestation and an alternative nature. I intend to use the expression “Occupy the law” in the same way as Wielsch (quoted in Steinbeis, 2012) to explain the transformative power of open licensing to achieve autonomy. Even if in this case the individualistic, author-centric conception of copyright law remains strong (Elkin-Koren, 2005; Dusollier, 2006; Barron, 2014), the copyleft hack allows us to use copyright law not to reserve, but to guarantee public access, reversing its original purpose. Peer production of law and digital rights activism can be achieved through distributed political action (Section 4), relying on technology, platforms and participation (Jenkins, 2006), and proposing alternatives to vertical capitalism (Söderberg, 2013; Powell, 2016a) as supported by liberal political and legal institutions. Distributed political action, or do-ocracy, has been successfully applied at least twice in order to challenge established property rights and liability allocated to individual persons at the international law level. International agreements (ACTA, SOPA, see Powell, 2016b) and the WIPO Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled (hereafter the Marrakesh Treaty) are recent global agreements affecting copyright and liability.